Dear LPG

Did you ever have a pen pal when you were young?  I did when I was in junior school, and it was pretty interesting to exchange information about our lives through the pictures and stories we sent each other, although I never met her or ever expected to.  Each of us girls lived on opposite sides of the world to the other, and I was pretty sure of that fact because the stamps on the letters she sent made it evident to me.

Over the years, like nearly everyone else, I have made many excellent friends, and those friendships have grown gradually.  When it comes to making face-to-face friends, like everyone else when I was younger, we would first meet in a group setting such as at work or in a school class, and then two or three of us would find out that we have a little more in common than the rest of the crowd.  We used our eyes and other senses to work out what sort of person we were talking to at first, and the rest of the group would become an insurance policy when it comes to making sure that your new friend is safe to be around.  

Retirement can leave many of us having to do that all over again as we leave our work friends behind. In reality, we often have become friendship-finding experts by the time we reach that age, but computer introductions don’t allow you any of those advantages.  

I bought myself a laptop as a retirement present and soon got fed up with it, but all that lockdown time left me with time to work out some of the basics. While I am still no computer wizard, I have learned quite a bit about finding my way around the World Wide Web.

Let me stress that I am far too old to be looking for any more than a few new platonic additions to broaden my circle of friends, but being isolated a couple of years back left me learning a bit more about what a computer can do.   It was not long before I found it comforting to be still able to make contact with my friends when we were all locked down, and while most of them were people I already knew in real life, I made a few new internet friends.  

There were as many reasons to decide on the odd online friendship as there were real ones, and when we were all at home so much of the time, I found that sending and getting messages gave me something else to focus on when there was not a lot else going on.   

I now have a couple of friends I have never met. We made our introductions online and continue to exchange messages and emails, but you do have to be careful…

The important thing is not to give too much away.  It can be hard to remember that you only have what they are writing to you when working out what person you are talking to.   Somehow, what a person looks like and how they look at and talk to you during a first face-to-face meeting can be hard enough to gauge, while a typed introduction doesn’t even give you those clues to use.  When you send a picture, you usually send the best you have, which is not always the one that shows what the ‘real you’ looks like, and words on a screen leave you with a first impression which is much harder to read because when writing, there is time to filter out all those little comments that slip into a spoken conversation.   You only have what they say about themselves to go by; you can only know what they want you to.  

Most of the more prominent social websites have extra safety levels if you believe what is said about internet security online. However, if you find yourself introduced to a potential new friend through a website, it might be the best idea to continue contacting them through that website for a bit.  

I am no expert, but I think that one of the most important things that we need to do is keep our virtual and real lives as separate as possible. Don’t give away too much personal information about yourself. It is sad to say that you only have what they tell you to go by, and it is a lot easier to write a lie than to tell one.

If you have to give contact details, make sure you offer your online address (email address) and not your home address, and be mindful of oversharing.  We can easily give away detailed specifics like (names of family members, date of birth, financial and health details and information about things we do at particular and regular times).  I am sure that there are many other things that I have missed on my list. 

I now have a couple of really good internet friends that I have never met, and it has all worked out well, but I know that it is not the same for others. Stories about people who have been scammed, both online and offline, continue to increase at an alarming rate, but we still need friends—a commodity that can come at a premium as we get older. 

SI, Lewisham

SI offers a little information worth reading regarding starting an internet friendship… 

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